The Price of Last Minute Planning

After a long Saturday spent doing some proper painting of the bathroom to a light gray, my husband and I were pretty relieved to be finished. It was a three day weekend but we had essentially planned on the worst case scenario and not planned anything for the entire weekend in case things went wrong with painting. We even primed and did two coats of paint and were able to finish it all in less than a day. With the exception of a big splotch of paint in my hair from trying to get the area behind the toilet we were pretty fine. Along came Sunday and we realized we still had Monday off.

The conversation pretty much went along the lines of something like this:

Husband: It’s labor day tomorrow.
Me: Yay and we both have tomorrow off.
Husband: We should do something.
Me: Yes we should.
Both: Invite some people over and bbq?

After this we made a few calls to some friends to see if anyone didn’t have plans for the next day. Lo and behold some people didn’t! Then we realized that we needed to get a ton of food and it had to be somewhat easy and ready to cook already. A trip to a crazy packed Costco was the solution to our problems. We went through and tried to find the easiest items possible for a last minute dinner. Certainly not what we would usually do, and we definitely paid more money to get some pre-made items!

Saving mula by cooking from scratch
Whenever we throw a party, no matter how small or large it is, we generally like to plan two weeks ahead of time to make sure people have enough notice and to be able to make a lot of the food ourselves. We both like to cook and we’re pretty decent at it so it’s a fun time to flex our muscles to see what we can come up with. This usually involves marinating items a day before at least, homemade baked goods, and of course freshly made dishes. Making a ton of food from scratch saves us a ton of money and then we don’t feel like we’ve just thrown a bunch of money away. Pre-made items tend to cost more because it’s been prepped and/or cooked already. It also allows us to have more parties without feeling too guilty. Most of our friends also like to contribute and bring a dish or two. We do end up doing the majority of food but it helps.

Not being able to control the quality and taste
We ended up grabbing some pre-marinated pork ribs and a veggie tray from Costco to minimize how much work we had to do. Price-wise it wasn’t really too bad at all but we weren’t sure how the ribs were going to taste. Luckily it ended up being pretty good and we were pretty happy. Other pre-marinated ribs we’ve tried have ended up having a store bought generic taste that we don’t want to eat and wouldn’t want to serve to guests.

With our habits we ended up still not spending a ton of money, but I’m sure we could have planned it better if we had planned ahead! We also could have saved ourselves some headache by not having to go to Costco at one of it’s busiest times. It was a pretty good labor day for us and the “bbq” went off without a hitch. We didn’t end up bbq’ing anything at all and just used the oven to slow cook the ribs til they fell off the bone.